To-Do List: A Payroll-Tax Deal and a Dog Show

To know: Congressional negotiators have reached a tentative deal that would extend the payroll-tax holiday, unemployment benefits, and the Medicare “doc fix” … Syrian President Bashar al-Assad set February 26th as the date for a referendum on a new constitution for the country … A prison fire in Honduras killed at least three hundred and fifty-seven people … Iran announced that it has loaded domestically made nuclear fuel rods into its research reactor … A Pekingese named Malachy won Best in Show at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.

To read: Affluent foreigners who live in New York have been choosing to send their children to public schools; the New York Times’Kirk Semple explains why:

“The kids were able to choose between seven different lunches: sushi and macrobiotics and whatever,” Ms. Rengier recalled. “And I said, ‘What if I don’t want my son to choose from seven different lunches?’ And she looked at me like I was an idiot.”

For the Rengiers, the decision was clear: Their son would go to public school.

“It was not the question if we could afford it or not,” said Ms. Rengier, whose husband was transferred to the city because of his job as a lawyer and tax consultant. “It was a question of whether it was real life or not.”

In Sports Illustrated (via Longreads), Thomas Lake writes about Wes Leonard, a “Michigan high schooler who made a game-winning basket and then died”:

After the autopsy, when the doctor found white blossoms of scar tissue on Wes Leonard’s heart, he guessed they had been secretly building there for several months. That would mean Wes’s heart was slowly breaking throughout the Fennville Blackhawks’ 2010-11 regular season, when he led them in scoring and the team won 20 games without a loss.

It would mean his heart was already moving toward electrical meltdown in December, when he scored 26 on Decatur with that big left shoulder clearing a path to the hoop. It would mean his heart swelled and weakened all through January (25 against Hopkins, 33 against Martin) even as it pumped enough blood to fill at least 10 swimming pools.